This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
198
The Keeper of the Bees

with hair that is long for a bee and it is soft and fine and when the workers go down into Mr. Male Iris to get nectar for their two stomachs and to fill their pollen baskets, the hair all over them fills with the pollen, too, and it is the law, because of God, that when any bee starts out to gather nectar and pollen it never mixes one flower with another. If it starts on iris, it keeps right on going to iris. You can see it now, can’t you? When the worker bee gets the pollen from Mr. Iris all over his hair and then goes on to get pollen from Miss Iris, the hair is going to scatter the pollen for her, that’s going to make the good seed come, 'cause the bees do the flowers’ courting for them. That’s a reason besides honey as to why bees are so useful.

"One time I asked the Bee Master if I couldn’t see God and if I couldn’t touch Him, how I was going to know that He was here. And he said, ‘Because of the hair on a bee.’ So that’s one of the ways you can know.

"Then there are a lot of ways you find out about God on account of how He made Queen bees. A beehive is just full of miracles and signs and symbols and wonders. The Bee Master said so. But perhaps the biggest wonder in the whole hive is just about the Queen. There is a lot about God mixed up with a Queen bee. Workers may only live five or six weeks, but a Queen may live five or six years. She is away bigger than a worker and she looks different. She is long and slender and has bigger wings, and she has a big abdomen ’cause she may lay a million or two eggs. She has only about half as many eyes as a